Architecture: Landscape and Poetry

RonPrice

SOME ENCHANTRESS

I had a desire to create, to recreate, the world I had grown accustomed to, was comfortable with at last, but which I was also getting tired of, was growing old with, was losing. The desire to capture, to fix, to preserve the world I had lived in and was experiencing with varying degrees of joy, fatigue, enthusiasm and emptiness, came on me gradually as I approached my fiftieth year. So I began to write with a passion, a purpose, at times a pride, and nearly always a poetic inclination. -Ron Price with thanks to Max Putzel, “Overture”, Genius of Place: William Faulkner’s Triumphant Beginnings, Louisiana State UP, Baton Rouge,

1985, pp.1-12.

Poetry became a way of defining,
expressing, the discomforts, the comforts,
the way it was now, then, when. It became
part of my map: my narrow world and wide
vistas, my invasion of outer worlds by inner
worlds, a certain improvisation, a fusion of
sound and sense, understanding my landscape.

It passed through me like a storm-wind, like
a gentle breeze, the warm sun of day, the cool
evening freshness after the heat. Doors of
perception were flung open, pressing the
architecture of my days with their subtle power,
composing and conceiving with some enchantress,
in my soul, nameless and inexplicable elegancies.

Ron Price
15 April 1996